AI for WordPress & 6.3 plans

Seems like the world of WordPress is ramping up on news and updates. It’s almost like everybody wants everything to be published and released for WordCamp Europe 😅

I’ll be roadtripping from my town in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands to Athens next Sunday over together with my son. Really looking forward to both the roadtrip, as well as meeting with you.

Let me know if I’ll see you there!

Inside WordPress is sponsored by InstaWP

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I was very happy to see the positive feedback I’ve received on my Accessibility highlight in the previous Inside WordPress edition. Taeke Reijenga even reached out saying they’re extending their ” pay what you want ” deal till today. So, if you haven’t jumped on board, now’s the time .

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

WordPress 6.3 is coming our way! Rich Tabor listed what it will ship with: Site Editor content editing, Command palette tool, Styles & Pages Site Editor menus, Site Editor Title Bar, New Details, Table of Contents, and Footnotes blocks, Better Top Toolbar, and a Refreshed Link UI. You can find the full list in the roadmap to 6.3 article .

For which of these are you most excited about?

What is happening to WordPress in the context of AI is huge. Lots of very big implacations left and right. In that light, Human Made is organizing an online event called AI for WordPress .

Yours truly will moderate a panel. You should probably want to attend. More info here .

I get asked this question a lot: ’What is the best WordPress hosting”. And instead of answering it straight up, I went ahead and recorded my answer and published it on YouTube .

I have made the decision to always record myself answering such questions going forward. Don’t mind repeating myself, but it had better be with a link, right? 😁

I asked Twitter this: What’s the one solution you wish you had available in WordPress, but you can’t seem to find it ?

Lots of great insight can be found in the answers as to what people struggle with WordPress.

WordPress is slated to have a Command Center .

I’m not sure what I think about this. Like, what problem is it trying to solve here?

Mathieu Viet published the third article about the future of BuddyPress .

🚀 Performance

Jonny Harris highlights a great ”TIL” . As of WP 4.6, you don’t have to call load_plugin_textdomain/load_theme_textdomain in your theme or plugin. WP using just-in-time translations & loads translations when they are needed. Calling these functions can decrease performance

Full explanation is here .

I published a new Within WordPress podcast with Slobodan Manić, and we talked a lot about WordPress & Performance. Great conversation , if I do say so myself.

With the announcement that INP is due to become a full Core Web Vital next year, optimising your responsiveness should be on all developers mindset over the next year. On web.dev Google published How to Optimize Interaction to Next Paint (INP) explaining just how to do that.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

Gobinda Tarafdar released his first WordPress theme called MrWriter . It’s a nice simple theme. I love it.

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution

💡 Interesting Finds

Recast is a tool that turns articles into easy-to-digest podcast conversations using AI.

I mean 🤯

Creating animated headers. Simple tool, but so good .

📖 What I am reading

A nice twitter thread by one of the co-founders of Github. I learned quite a few things I didn’t know.

🎁 Bonus

The bonus I’d like to share with everyone is a tweet that was missed by most. Ronnie Burt shared some of the new things slated for Gravatar. Yes, Gravatar is getting updates! I couldn’t believe it myself either.

That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!